A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column on California public affairs.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

CONFUSION SETS IN OVER GROUND WATER LAW

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 24, 2015, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CONFUSION SETS IN OVER GROUND WATER
LAW”

It’s beginning to look like the
hosannas that greeted California’s first-ever groundwater regulation law were a
tad premature when it passed late last summer.

For after a tantalizing winter of
heavy rains but insufficient snowfall to dent the state’s four-year drought,
confusion over the groundwater rules has begun to set in.

One thing for sure: The rain and snow
of the just-concluding winter have not been nearly enough to begin recharging
California’s more than 100 significant aquifers. These have been pumped without
regulation for many decades, to the point where land subsidence has become
highly visible in the San Joaquin Valley and some other areas.

The new law’s rules sounded just fine
– until someone happened to look at the time limits. The rules are set up to
force water agencies to design local regulations preventing further overdrafts,
an overdraft defined as pumping more water from underground than percolates
down to replace it. The state will review all such plans and take over
regulation if locals don’t enforce their new restrictions.

Sounds great, and it might improve
matters 25 years from now if there’s anything left in those aquifers. There had
better be: California gets almost 40 percent of its current water supply from
underground, and a California with little groundwater would have to cuts its
population considerably.

But there are no guarantees, partly
because local water authorities have until the end of next year merely to
decide who controls ground water in each area – this could be county
supervisors or irrigation district officers or just about anyone. Whoever gets
jurisdiction will have five to seven more years to design plans creating
sustainability – a balance between pumping and replenishment. After that,
they’ll have 20 years to put the plans into action.

So it might be about 30 years before
the rules have any detectable effect, and at current pumping rates, there would
be little or no groundwater left by then. Which means this law has never
had teeth. Nor, after lobbyists for ground water users got through with the
Legislature, was it intended to.

It’s all been happy talk all along.

But even that is now dissipating.
While the choice of agency to control ground water has been easy and obvious in
some areas like the Coachella Valley of Riverside County, which sits atop a
gigantic underground lake, disputes are rising elsewhere.

Canal districts want control in some
areas, but so do nearby irrigation districts. In some places, county
supervisors want control, even though aquifers never conform to political
boundaries or property lines. In some cases, more than one water agency’s
boundaries cover parts of a single aquifer. In others, water agency lines cover
more than one source of underground water.

So power struggles are now in nascent
phases, with some officials nonplussed. “I expect we’ll coordinate to share
basins with other districts,” says one water manager. “But we’re unsure how to
do that.” And the new law doesn’t spell out patterns to follow, another of its
multiple flaws.

None of this, of course, prevented
farm area lawmakers from opposing the weak new law while it was under
consideration. Their shortsighted obstructionism has made that law practically
unworkable even before it’s supposed to get started.

So this law is both ludicrous and
worthy of satire, except that the continuing depletion of aquifers is no
laughing matter.

Which means it’s time for the
Legislature to get back to work, if lawmakers are capable of that.

The timetable needs to be cut
from 30 years down to no more than five. There must be a mechanism to create
new groundwater agencies if existing districts can’t resolve disputes.

And there needs to be far more
reliable information on the exact amount of water in each basin. Failure to do
any of these things will surely produce a far more severe disaster than the
current drought – unless Mother Nature intervenes with several years of much
heavier rain and snow than California has seen in decades.

-30-
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski
Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign
to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is
tdelias@aol.com

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About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.